Segmentation of Fingerprint Impressions and Signatures

Abstract

Organizations like banks, post office, passport office, civil registrations get hundreds of applications daily for enrollment into their systems. Some of the most common data they require for enrollment are photographs, signatures, fingerprint impressions etc. These data require scanning by using a desktop scanner and subsequent precise cropping to remove unnecessary white spaces. A significant amount of labor is incurred when the amount of data is in the order of hundreds. In this project the aforementioned enrollment process has been automated by using simple image processing algorithms. The boundaries of each fingerprint impression are determined by using the scan-lines followed by the region of interests for segmenting the fingerprints. In another work, different morphological operations are used to identify the fingerprint impressions. Segmentation becomes complex when the impressions do not follow any particular order. To counter such problems connected components of a pixel are used for segmenting the impressions.